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Support Grahame Morris MP’s #WASPI petition

The excellent Labour MP Grahame Morris has been a steadfast advocate for ‘WASPI’ women – the women penalised by ill-conceived and callous government changes to pension laws, costing them up to £45,000 each from their pension entitlement.

Grahame’s face was a picture when a government minister at a debate Morris had arranged outraged WASPI women by telling them to get apprenticeships instead of retiring:

Grahame has launched a petition to gather support for his campaign to get fair arrangements for the WASPI women and to reverse the huge injustice that has been done to them by a callous and incompetent Tory government:

https://t.co/hdD1XyzLpB Women have been robbed of their pensions, sign and share my petition to bring justice for 1950's WASPI Women.

Please show your support for these ill-treated women and for an outstanding Labour MP by signing the petition here – and then sharing it.

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Please sign this, everyone.
As a WASPI woman myself, I can confirm we have been treated disgracefully. I should have access to my state pension by now. Instead, I have to do battle with the DWP to get ESA. I’m also stung by the bedroom tax and cannot make ends meet. I could go on. What happened to the idea we look after the old and the vulnerable?

Addressed to the next Labour government, that might be sooner than you think hopefully.

That includes women born 1960 with raised pension age 66 but not included in WASPI campaign.
And men and women born in the 1960s and 1970s with pension age 67 and 68.
As well as all pensioner ages 60 to 100 plus.
Furthermore includes the I Daniel Blakes, men and women, who lost pension credit from 60 to 66 progressively in stages since 2012, so dumped into the brutally callous Jobcentre system, with least chance of a new job and most likelihood of long term out of work, so sanctioned the same as all ages.

Revising Labour’s Manifesto would bring millions of votes to Labour, when Labour lost 75 per cent of pensioner vote in 2015. Most of the half of all England and Wales’ non-voters were women in 2015.

Would very much encourage share, please, with your local trade union Branch Secretary / newsletter, to gain the signatures to help this become policy during this period of Labour’s State Pension Tour Consultation. Thanks.

It is tough on women born in the early sixties but women born earlier than this were given the least notice to prepare for the change. The older they are, the less notice they received (hence women born in the early fifties are worse affected than women born at the end). All their financial planning is ‘up the creek’ at very short notice and with no compensation – after a lifetime of much lower wages than men.

Also, women born after the 1950s benefited from equality legislation and changing attitudes to women’s rights. It was considered ‘extreme’ to support women’s rights when I was a girl/young woman and at school we were taught to expect to be housewives and nothing more. Hence, when the boys were doing things like physics, tech drawing etc, we girls were learning how to cook and sew on buttons. We were being prepared for a world that expected women to give up their jobs/careers on getting married and rely on our husbands’ National Insurance contributions to get a pension. Employment for women was just for ‘pin money’.

If society stupidly brings up a generation to think this is normal (and I personally hated it), it is grossly immoral to suddenly pull the rug out from under the women’s feet later in life and expect them to somehow cope with the fall-out of social and economic change they weren’t prepared for. We were being prepared for a world that was dying out which wasn’t our fault.

At the time, women supporting women’s rights were demonized. Now, those who accepted the status quo in their prime are being demonized when they can least cope with it. Women can’t win.

Hi again, Amy. I agree that you’ve got a rough deal which is clearly wrong but the pension age changes are on a scale and so it’s impossible to draw a line without affecting people marginally on the wrong side of it.

The changes ought to be spread over a much longer timescale and with much smaller changes for individual women. That way, more women would be affected but only in a very small way (say, by one year and with plenty of notice). As it is, it’s just bad government policy.

I was born in the mid-1950s and was dismayed to hear someone on the radio a few months ago saying that the government would be more likely to help WASPI women if we concentrated on women born in the first half of the 1950s as they are the worst affected. If that were to happen, I would be in the same situation you are now – falling just on the wrong side of the line.

For the record, my retirement age went up from 60 to 65 and then, more recently, to 66.They twice redrew the line. I despair at ever being allowed to reitre which is galling because I’m in my early 60s and have to claim ESA.

Instead of being a pensioner now (as I expected and planned to be), I am in fact a so-called ‘scrounger’ that’s being urged back to work by apprenticeships!! You’re right to use the word ‘joke’.